


Just Desserts

by apocketfulofwry



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Astrophysics, Canon Compliant, Carl Sagan - Freeform, Chloe KNOWS, Chloe/Lucifer - Freeform, Chlucifer - Freeform, Comfort, Cute, Deckerstar - Freeform, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Feels, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Food, Happy Ending, Kissing, Light Angst, Light-Hearted, Oneshot, Plot What Plot, Romance, Sweet, TINY TINY angst, mild prose wanking, post 5x08, shortfic, unapologetic fluff, warm apple pie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26966278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocketfulofwry/pseuds/apocketfulofwry
Summary: You must first invent the universe (if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch).Once the dust has settled, and everybody has been given their just desserts, there is only them. And warm apple pie.A.k.a. Chloe comes home early and finds Lucifer in her kitchen.
Relationships: Chloe Decker & Lucifer Morningstar, Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, Chlucifer, Deckerstar
Comments: 30
Kudos: 185





	Just Desserts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ophelia_Raine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ophelia_Raine/gifts).



_We are starstuff that has taken destiny into our hands._

\-- Carl Sagan

**

“You know there’s food delivery services for this, right?”

His answering smile is a wicked quirk of those ridiculously full lips.

“Ah but Detective, where’s the fun in that? Aren’t you always going on about all good things to those who wait, that the greatest of rewards are directly proportional to the efforts made in obtaining them and whatnot?”

She crosses her arms and eyes the counter warily.

“Most things are, but then you can’t exactly Uber Eats criminals behind bars.”

“Or can you?” He says this as more of a playfully issued challenge than the rhetorical retort it would be from anybody other than him - and even through her relaxed amusement, Chloe can’t help but feel he would probably try to make good on this absurdity if only to prove his point. She’s learned to never underestimate his willpower once he’s determined to get something done. It’s equal parts blessing and curse depending on the exact situation she finds herself in with him.

He’s still smiling. Always mischievous. Those dimples and that stubble devastating to most, but Chloe Decker thanks her lucky stars for her imperviousness, else her brain would be reduced to a mush of malfunctioning lust – _thank you very much_. There is no room for his mojo in her kitchen – or for any manipulations between them. After all they had been through, the battles they had fought to find their way back to one another and bind themselves to each other, this warm autumn afternoon seemed a long-overdue reprieve from the usual tumult that surrounded their daily existence. Their lives always teetering on the edge of normal, a hairsbreadth away from absolute chaos.

She shakes off her musings as a dog shakes off water, disliking the way that melancholia still has a tendency to invade her thoughts. Not here, not now. Not when they had come so far to get to where they are.

“Don’t even think about it,” she warns. “Nevermind that – what is the point of this entire exercise again?”

She doesn't think it is possible but his smile broadens even further as he theatrically shrugs off his jacket, draping it carefully over the back of a chair. He rolls up the sleeves of his white linen shirt, exposing tanned forearms corded with lean muscle. A magician setting up his trick.

“Why Detective I’m trying to do something nice for you – As I said earlier, I’m going to make you apple pie – the proper way. None of the shortcuts with premade mixes and your Pillsbury frozen rubbish.”

“You bake.” This she’s got to see. She knows he’s talented (so, so _talented_ ) at many things, but somehow one cannot simply associate the reckless abandon with which he hurls himself into all of his pursuits with the careful, exacting patience needed to make this most iconic of comfort foods.

“I believe I’m uniquely qualified for such an endeavor.”

“If you make a forbidden fruit joke here, so help me --”

It’s a testament to the stability that accompanied their growth as a couple that any mention of Eve, of Eden, of his role as temptation incarnate fails to ruin their mood, merely adds another dimension to their banter, this knowledge of one another.

His warm chuckle rumbling through her is the memory of her father coming home from work and sweeping her up to his shoulders. From that height she could survey the kingdom of their home, and knew all was well.

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Tell me Detective, what is apple pie made out of?” He gestures towards the array of ingredients before him on the kitchen island, as he sifts and carefully measures out the precise amounts needed - from memory.

“Is this a trick question?”

“Humor me.”

“Apples. And flour,” she starts to say. “Sugar, butter, eggs. And some cinnamon - if that’s your thing.”

“I knew you were secretly into pumpkin spice!”

“ _Lucifer_.”

“Mhmm,” he hums conciliatorily. “Now what do you suppose those ingredients you mentioned are made out of?”

“Tell me.”

“Molecules.” 

He doesn’t elaborate, and Chloe does not push; both merely content to stay within this bubble of companionable silence. He mixes, then kneads and folds at the dough gradually taking form underneath his skilled fingers, somehow managing to stay immaculate and pristine, the bits of scattered flour weaving in the air knowing better than to dare alight on his Armani.

While he occasionally glances up to smile at her as he works, when he stops to look at her with the entirety of his intense regard, there is no disquiet, no anxiety in being the focus of his considerable attention. Conversely, there is grounding, a sense of peace. A tethering, if you will, instead of feeling adrift on an open sea of possibilities so infinite as to prove unfathomable.

“So…molecules,” she repeats, breaking the silence, watching as he turned to place the formed crust into the refrigerator to chill - uncertain where he was headed with this entire exercise, but something told her to take it seriously as he began to speak again, to flesh out the ideas he had sowed earlier.

“Molecules, yes. To use the labels you humans and your science have decided to place on what simply _is_.”

And there is the crux of the matter. Even though he uses textbook terminologies she had learned – and forgotten – this was a palpable reminder that he once created entire realms in his mind, forged only by the sheer power of his will.

“These molecules are, in turn, made up of atoms – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and more. Where do these atoms come from? Stars. Save for hydrogen, atoms are all made in stars.” A pause, and he looks at her with a strange expression on his face, caught between truth and terror, a thousand potential trajectories that this conversation could take.

Of course.

Lucifer and his _stars_. 

He must have found whatever reassurance he was looking for in her expression, as he pressed on.

“Now, a star is like Dad’s cosmic kitchen. You have your atoms of hydrogen, which are then cooked into heavier atoms,” he continues. He’s peeling apples with an economy of movement and grace that could only be borne out of familiarity, and it should be a cliché to describe it as poetry in motion but watching him wield the blade with precision and the unbroken stretch of paper-thin peel swiftly winding away from gradually bared fruit reminds her that there are things he could do with sharp, pointy objects that do not involve food and are decidedly less sexy. “Fascinating things, stars. They’re a result of the condensation of interstellar gas and dust which, again, are largely made up of hydrogen.”

Chloe sits in enraptured silence, the golden cadence and flow of his voice near hypnotic as she listened to Lucifer explain in their – _humanity’s_ – words the hows and whys of something he had simply _willed_ into existence. “Your hydrogen, Detective, was made during the Big Bang. Which was, as your scientists will tell you, the birth of creation, our cosmos, of you and I.”

He shoots her a meaningful look. He is so, so beautiful it aches to look at him, standing in her kitchen, bathed in the golden glow of autumnal light, on this halcyon day. The air between them is charged, weighed down by the immensity of his truths.

There is nothing she could say at this moment that would not sound pithy to her own ears, but as the words leave her mouth, she knows they are _exactly_ what he needs. “So what you’re saying is, if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you’ve got to invent the universe?”

His smile is back, and it is the burst of birdsong on the first day of spring, the air crisp on her cheeks as sleeping life awakens. “I knew you were a quick study.”

Chloe has no choice but to launch herself at him and kiss that wicked grin off his face, the yearning to be reminded of the feel of his stubble rasping between her breasts too great for any notions of propriety to prevail.

**

In the aftermath, he nuzzles into the back of her neck, huffing warm breaths that sends tingles of renewed interest down her spent body, pulsing in time with the aftershocks in between her thighs.

He lazily traces sonnets onto the sensitive skin of where buttock and hip become thigh, letters spelling out words from long-forgotten dialects, far back enough in the annals of human history when alphabets had been mere scratches on clay. 

He sears meaning into her.

“Back in Egypt, and mind - this was about a millennia or so before Yeezy and his fanboys decided to cock up a perfectly good system of time – humans worshipped the Sun. Those days they thought that vision came from the eye – a sort of radar to perceive the world with, if you will – reaching out to trace the object they were seeing. With that piece of logic, and given their monotheistic religion - it made sense to them that the Sun in the sky was Dad’s gaze looking down upon them. I find it as ironic now as I did back then. I hung the stars. I made the Sun. And still it’s Dad looking down on them.”

This is said with not an ounce of bitterness, but with matter of fact and resigned humor, far from the usual animosity directed at his father before _He_ had come down to give his errant sons a celestial spanking, dragging the protesting Michael back home for what Chloe could only hope would be an epic reckoning.

He flips them over – oh wiry, wiry muscle hiding such deceptive strength – and touches his forehead to hers. In his eyes she can see the birth of galaxies, his breath mingling with hers carries with it trace particles of stardust. When he presses his lips to hers, she thinks about the circumstances of her birth and that of his creation, all the way back to the Big Bang and if atoms can neither be created nor destroyed, but merely shift and move on subatomic levels, flowing like energy - then -

His atoms and her atoms are one and the same since the universe began.

Dimly, she hears the timer ping downstairs, but opts instead to give herself over to the sensation of his hands unbuttoning, pushing his dress shirt off her shoulders. His lips once more igniting fiery paths where his hands had been.

After all, when the dust has settled, and everyone has been given their just desserts –

There is only them. And warm apple pie.

**Author's Note:**

> So. Um. *clears throat* First time writing for this fandom. Before this I haven’t written anything in years and I’m pretty rusty. But along comes Ophelia_Raine who knows what she wants and one day just went, “Come watch this series with me,” and so I got hooked. 
> 
> So, Ophelia, this one’s for you, my guiding light as I fumble through these attempts at cobbling together words and hoping they make sense.
> 
> Thank you to all who read and review. Still getting a feel for these characters, so drop me a line as comments and constructive criticism are very much welcome. :)


End file.
